Microsoft code cannot taint Linux

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 21 July 2009 09:18

Opinion and Analysis

Exactly why people would want to run a stable system like Linux on top of an unstable one like Windows - any version - isn't clear to me.


But that's what the code contributed to the Linux kernel by Microsoft recently is meant to facilitate.

As my colleague and Linux guru David Williams reported, Microsoft has contributed 22,000 lines of code to the kernel, which, as he put it, makes up "four drivers that provide hooks for any Linux distribution to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor virtualisation."

This is just one indication of an admission by Microsoft that it needs to work with Linux.

Not for nothing do many people in the FOSS community regard any moves by Microsoft in their direction as suspicious. But in this case, there is one leveller - the General Public License.

This is the same license that has been described as viral by the friendly folk at Redmond. This is one of the reasons why Steve Ballmer has likened Linux to a cancer.

But this very same licence guarantees that Microsoft cannot get up to any monkey (and I use word advisedly at this juncture) business.

The GPL is a fair licence. Very simply put, all it asks for is share and share alike. As the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, Bradley Kuhn puts it, "anyone who redistributes GPL'ed software or GNU/Linux distributions that include GPL'ed software must include the complete, machine-readable source code in the preferred form for modification to anyone who receives binaries of the GPL'ed software (or they must give a written offer for that source)."

To quote from the FAQ : "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL. Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you."

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